How to Win with Business Messaging with WhatsApp Director Partnerships Cristiane Reis

on Instagram Direct as well. All right, so let's talk about business. So we were talking about messaging. So what does that have to do with, um, business? If you look at small business, customers are already messaging with business. Um, 80% of small business in India and Brazil says that WhatsApp helps them communicate with their business. So it's something that's already happening. And sometimes I think, you know, in the US where our penetration might not be that big, it's a number that's easily, easily missed. But when you look at these highly populated markets, people are already communicating with business using our platforms. And as this communication, as more people communicate with business, one thing that we're seeing is expectations have changed quite dramatically. When we survey people, 61% of people say they prefer to message a business over picking up the phone. So if you think about a few years back, this is a tremendous change. I mean, more people today prefer to message a business than pick up the phone and talk to someone. And 59% of people would prefer messaging a business over email. So there's a massive, massive shift in terms of communication medium that's happening between people and business. And I love this slide because it talks about different perspectives on business messaging. When we surveyed business, 7 in 10 business believe that they're already doing a great job communicating with their customers. But when we ask the customers, only 2 in 10 agree. So there's a gap here in how business think they're communicating with customers and how customers are actually perceiving this communication. And a lot of that is because the engagement model has changed. When you talk to people, a lot of them expect, 89%, I mean, that's almost everyone, right? It's a very high number. Expect brands to respond within 24 hours. So if I'm messaging with a business, I want the response to come out fast. I don't want to be sitting there and waiting for an undetermined amount of time. 80% of people say that they, um, that the experience that they have with the business is as important as its goods or services. So let that sink in for a bit. You could be selling the best product ever out there, but if the experience you're providing your customers is not good, they're not going to be happy. And 52% of people have switched brands because of their services. So there's a, there's a big change in how people want to communicate with business, what their expectations are in terms of this communication, And also a really big trend that not just what you sell is important, but how you're selling it and the services that you're providing with it. So here's where we, you know, we talked about why messaging is important. You know, there's a massive switch to messaging, and that is between people and between people and business. So let's talk a little bit about why, um, Why WhatsApp? So first I wanna talk about what's WhatsApp's mission. So our mission is to connect the world through real-time communication. And we've done that in quite a successful way. Today we're the largest messaging platform out there. We have over 2 billion people in our platform, over 180 countries, over 60 languages. So, You know, it's really a success story in this short life of WhatsApp, what we've been able to do in terms of people-to-people communication. And we want to do the same thing we've done for business, the same thing we've done for people, we want to do for business. And this is not written on the company's mission, this is me talking. And my vision for this is 100% of people talking to 100% of business over WhatsApp. So we want to enable any person to discover, to communicate, and to do transactions with any business in our platform. And if you think about why business today are, are very dependent and why they want to use our platform, um There's basically 3 pillars. We have a very large reach, right? We're the largest messaging platform in the world. So 2 billion people use us every month. Our engagement is very, very high. And this is a measure of how often people keep coming back to the app and how they— what is their feeling about the app, how they feel about what's happening there. And 64% of people agree that WhatsApp has helped of them create a personal connection to a business. So when they talk to a business, they feel very connected to that business. And 60— oh, sorry, my slides are shifting here. And 68% of people prefer to use WhatsApp to connect to a business than other platforms. And I'm not going to go through the numbers here, but Basically what the slide talks about is if you think about the customer journey, right, people that connect with your company and the things they're going to do with you, um, from pre-purchase when they are making general inquiries through the purchase all the way to customer support, all across this journey people prefer to do these activities via a messaging platform. Sorry, I'm moving things around here. Something popped up in my screen. So if you think about how users are using our platform, we did a survey across key markets and it just reinforces the same message I've been talking about, how users feel more confident when they're messaging a business versus sending an email. People feel that they're more connected to the business business, that they will get hold of this business better. There's a bigger sense of confidence to the business as a whole. 68% of our users agree that WhatsApp is the easiest method of contacting a business, and 71% feel that they are more confident about that business after they've messaged with that platform, with the business in the platform. So we talked about, you know, going back, we talked about why, what's happening with this big shift to messaging. We talked about why WhatsApp is relevant in this space. So let's talk about how you can actually get the most out of our business solutions. So the first thing that we talk to companies about is establishing your presence on WhatsApp. So this is basically done by creating a profile in our platform, and we offer today two solutions to the market. And basically, people— a lot of people know WhatsApp for the personal app that you use to communicate with your friends and family. We have two other products that are targeted at business. The first one is what we call the WhatsApp Business app. This is a free app you can download from the, the Play Store, the App Store, and this app is targeted at the microbusiness. This app will allow a small business to create a profile on WhatsApp. It has some features regarding tagging. You can tag your customers to identify their lifecycle. You know, there's someone that I need to call, there's someone that needs to pay me, whatever it might be. And it's targeted for people that are running their small business with one computer. And of phone. Then we have a larger solution called the WhatsApp Business API that is targeted at large business, and this solution actually allows the complete integration with your CRM and the, all the systems that companies use to contact their, to contact their clients. It's a more complex solution targeted at any company that are running with more than a computer and a phone. The second one is discovery. So you have your presence on WhatsApp, how do people find you? And that can be done through two different methods. One via our click-to-WhatsApp. So if you use Facebook as an advertiser, you can put a— place an ad on Facebook. This ad will allow you to click on the ad and go straight into a conversation to WhatsApp. And we have the same thing for, for Instagram as well. And then the third step of this journey is actually communicate with your customers. And we have different use cases that we allow in the platform. One use case is what we call customer care, which is any user-initiated conversation so that your customers will contact you. There'll be a back and forth between you and your user, and we don't charge for this type of communication. There's a 24-hour window of any any consumer contacts you, you can do this back and forth. The second use case is what we call notification. So I think in the US, I mean, people receive a lot of SMS text messages. This would be something similar but in a much high— a highly engaged platform, which is WhatsApp. And it can be used to send real-time notification. A good example is, you know, you want to send a boarding pass or a receipt of a transaction. This is what this is a use case is for. Oh, that's so weird. I see overlay on the slide. I don't know what it is. But anyway, what this slide is talking about is today we see we have solutions that take you from the pre-purchase to the entire post-purchase, the entire customer journey in our platform. So I'm going to pause here. My intention was to have a real, a very short presentation on what we offer. I think that the meat of the discussion is probably like the questions and answers. So I'm going to stop here, see if anyone has any questions.

We have not received any questions in the inbox just yet, but anyone can unmute and ask directly.

Hi there, this is Mark Bailey. I— a little bit about me, I run growth and sales enablement for a company that does SaaS for transportation, and we found that messaging has actually been much more effective for us in terms of getting prospects to demos and post-cycle. So I'm very interested to understand what the experience is in a little more detail on this API solution specifically. Like what does the customer experience feel like? Do they wonder how we gave them a message on WhatsApp, or whereas a text they know we just texted them directly?

Yeah, so it's a great question. On the consumer side, in terms of the interface, and I'll show you a public— hopefully you could see it, I'm gonna try to angle of the screen. Oh, I have a background, you're not going to be able to see it. This, this is Aeroméxico. It's, you know, it's a Mexican airline, but we have many large clients using the platform today. Netflix is one that you could sign up for it so you could see the experience. But as a user, you will not know that the backend is coming from an API. You're going to receive a message on your WhatsApp that is going to be very similar to the message you receive from your customer, with the difference that for business clients we do have a verification badge that basically indicates to a client, hey, this is real, really a business. And we go through our backend to make sure that this business is who they say they are, so to allow for more trust on the platform. So from the consumer side, the message will be very similar to what you receive from a friend. Now we do require business when they come into our platform to obtain opt-ins, exactly to avoid people receiving random messages and not knowing where they're coming from. We're very conscious about, you know, We think that we got to 2 billion users because of the simplicity of the platform and because of the trust on the platform. So we're very worried about keeping the quality high. So we do ask business to obtain an opt-in so that the— when the consumer gets that notification, they know exactly why they're being messaged by that business. Now the reverse of that is if a consumer has your number, right? If they came in through an entry point, either to a click to WhatsApp or a QR code, or they just found your number on a website and they want to message you, and then obviously there, there's no need for an opt-in. The consumer is initiating that thread. So I hope I answered your question.

Yes, that's great. Thank you.

We have another question in the inbox. What do you notice the most common type of business chat is, or is it kind of all over the place? Curious if there are any data or insights about, say, retail engagement versus something like technical support for a business.

Yeah. We are noting— noticing success in many, many verticals. You know, I can name a few. It'd be hard to say one that we're not seeing success in business messaging, but retail, fin services, telcos, services. And then, you know, especially after COVID hit, the world has changed tremendously as business adapt to this new reality of not having a brick and mortar and having to go online. So we're actually seeing business scale in every area. I have to say that there's very common use cases. They're very successful. So I'll name a few. Tracking of packages is one. You make a purchase, you're receiving a confirmation, a tracking. Request for a copy of your bill or your receipt is It's a very large use case. Conversational commerce is a trend that we're seeing. I think the whole world is seeing growing at a very fast pace where consumers are contacting companies to understand more about a product. There's a conversation that goes back and forth, and then there's a transaction that happens after that. Um, see if I'm missing any. Customer care, it's, it's a really big trend, especially if you think about the cost of call centers and the savings that a company can have by shifting their contact center into more of a messaging platform. So while one agent can only talk to one person, an agent can answer to multiple chat threads. We're seeing many successes in those use cases as well.

Any other questions? We have probably about 6 more minutes if there are more questions from the audience.

Oh, if not, thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you, and have a wonderful day.

Thank you very much. Thank you for joining, everyone. Have a nice day.

Thank you very much.